Chronicling Backlash Against Slack

The hits keep coming, and this time it’s from Entrepreneur.com contributor Mike Trigg. The Slacklash train is quite a bit longer than when this blog first started and there has a been a bit more sober reflection on whether Slack is actually helping productivity. Trigg asks if it may just be Silicon Valley’s time to turn on last year’s darling, or maybe there’s something deeper

As a messaging service, Slack is excellent with great features like channels that, in theory, should make people more productive. But because Slack can be used to communicate about anything, it’s hard for users to intuitively grasp how to employ it most effectively. As a result, channels become overloaded leading to a torrent of notifications and messages that users can’t keep up with.

The Atlantic getting meta just like Slacklash.com. Seems like there’s a wave coming and the same distraction sentiment is coming up in a lot of places. It’ll be interesting to see what shakes out over the next 6 months as more and more companies quit.

People can decide how many separate groups to participate in, or how robust their notification settings are. Slack also created a do-not-disturb feature, so that after-hours messages can be sent—but won’t pop up on someone’s phone until they choose. Weirdly, this makes the experience of “checking Slack” more like email than anything else. Maybe that’s fitting: Many of the problems people attribute to Slack—that it naturally encourages round-the-clock attention to work, that it prompts people to be terse—are merely extensions of email culture. Which is another reason why the popularity of Slack and its peers is doomed, says Rebecca Greenfield, the Bloomberg reporter: “As it did with e-mail, though, our love of group chat will eventually morph into loathing.”